History Repeating Itself (Week 8)

'That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.' - Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s remarks are quite apposite for the practices of our political leaders. As discussed in Week 5, politicians can easily make a habit of repeating their failures. The panellists cited the woeful track record of invasions of Afghanistan as an apt example. Perhaps politicians are better at learning from the past tactics of their peers than from the successes and failures of past strategies. It was widely noted that Kevin Rudd positioned himself in the 2007 election as a slightly younger John Howard. Kevin’s approach evokes the behavioural phenomenon described in Week 3 where game show contestants adopt tactics which have recently helped their peers win. His ambition to lead his party to the ‘reforming centre’ supports the application of the Hotelling model, also from Week 3, to modern Australian politics.

The study of history presents to our leaders an awareness of the industrial flaws common to history and politics alike. Practitioners in both fields cannot help but use their own context as a reference point for their work. For politicians, this can lead to arrogance in foreign policy such as the Western assumption that democracies will always prevail. Paul Burton reminded us that the United States and Athens are anomalies among the many authoritarian superpowers of history. On a domestic level, if politicians focus too much on their own context and that of the majority they can tend to parochialism. The discussion in Week 6 explained the psychological basis for the political success of ingroup parochialism and its deleterious effect on political debate and minority causes.

A corollary of political and historical ‘presentism’ is that we find it hard to address or acknowledge change and even catastrophe in advance. To paraphrase Jarod Diamond, we are better at plotting the current co-ordinates of the graph of social progress than its first or second derivatives. Joan Beaumont suggested that some of the ongoing historical interest in the fall of the Roman Empire can be attributed to displaced anxiety about the fall of modern day empires. Unfortunately for politicians, in this case it is not possible to draw a direct lesson or analogy from the past. The study of history teaches us that the complexity of human political behaviour renders many events contingent upon contextual factors such as geography and even luck.

Value of a and b unknown or unseen

The contingency and complexity of history ought to encourage politicians to take an adaptive and flexible approach to the future. It is not possible to design an experiment to understand every facet of the world around us and nor is it possible to objectively predict the path the future will take. One question to the panel reminded us of the significance of foresighting given the unpredictability of human events. This and other future-proofing techniques must balance the logic of experience with the creativity of imagined possibilities. In Week 7, Craig Savage suggested that children might make the best scientists due to their uninhibited imaginations. Politicians should not fear adaptive foresight and flexible planning because it is unorthodox, though they must ensure that it does not become naive.

(c) Cathy Wilcox

Politicians and historians do struggle to build flexibility and contingency into their crafting of past and future stories. They tend to follow our ingrained cultural preference for traditional narrative arcs. Our political discourse entails a strong status quo bias whereby we find it hard to foresee events outside a familiar pattern where narrative complication meets a simple resolution. Our tutorial mock election where my group run an won as the Nazi Party demonstrated that even with the benefit of hindsight, people are often prepared to believe promises for the future that are too good to be true.

Burton compared the use of familiar story arcs in history to a preference for reality TV over reality itself. Similarly, in politics we would prefer a superficial reality TV soundbite of Julia Gillard’s values to a genuine understanding of reality At Home With Julia. I would have liked to ask Burton whether our choice of traditional narratives to guide the politics of the present can modify the future by predetermining our responses and attitudes.

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